And I also came to Washington because I had read Mailer-yes, we all had read Mailer-Mailer's existential yap and yaw. In coming to the capital there was then the possibility that, while disassociating myself from a government I hated, I could test my own strengths. I could recapture what I missed by missing the Pentagon battle in '67.

I had no political allegiance, being too alienated to trust the liberals and not mad enough to join the Weathermen. As for the radicals, what leadership did they offer? A true radical. I've always held, can hardly ever be a leader. Radicals were made to sit in the back room of cheap cafes, debating ideology. That fantasy appealed to me, but even that had become impossible.

So I had really come only to test myself. And in the meantime to pretend merely to play a role, to be a would-be streetfighter, to laugh at my own needs, to search out ironies and inconsistencies, to hunt down all that was absurd.

For the real self-test had been denied. The march was too bland, the cops were too friendly, and a real confrontation had never come off. For all our romanticizing, the gas had precluded all possibilities of confrontation. How do you fight an element? The use of gas masks makes cops disguise themselves, it denies demonstrators the use of their only weapons, their bodies. Gas had neutralized the situation. So why feel guilty that I hadn't been blinded by it, or that it hadn't made me vomit? Was that the confrontation I had come for? Because if it was I could have just as easily stayed in Cambridge and tried to determine how long I could hold a plastic bag over my head.

Of course one could always throw rocks back into the gas. Into and through the gas, at the windows of banks, specialty shops, book stores. Except that that tactic seemed just another admission of the impossibility of real confrontation.

But I had also been lucky. Unlike most of the others, I had had my tacky bit of existential drama. It had taken place right out there on Canal Road. And now, here it was five in the morning, and I was forcing my recalcitrant body to sleep in the crowded quarters of the car's front seat. The guy with the bullhorn and Frank's white Rambler-they must serve as my moral equivalent of war. Second-rate substitutes of course, but then, you'll have to admit, these are second-rate times we are living in, you and I.

"Who do you think that guy in the woods was anyway?" Joel asked, along about six, as we were all in the process of shifting into more comfortable positions.

"You really think there was someone there?" I asked. "My theory is that the place was a secret government installation, and all we heard was this recording, they've got that goes off every five minutes."

David laughed. "Right-on," he muttered.

Yes, the joke must still be maintained at all costs.

Right-on, brother?

Right-on, sister?

Yes, though I hate to have to say it, right-on!